Methods of Search Engine Optimization: Site Research, Marketing, and Achieving Good Ranking Results

Search engine marketing is one of the most effective methods of promoting your Internet business. Through good search engine marketing, you get targeted website visitors from search engines on which your website has a good ranking – and optimization is your plan to get good rankings.

I have worked on hundreds of sites, helping to optimize content and structure for better search engine placement. Through this work, I’ve devised a series of two “phases” which break the work down into understandable pieces:

Phase One: Current Site Research

Phase Two: Relevant Keyword Research

This article will help you work out phase one on your own terms, performing a basic series of steps toward discovering your site’s current standings so that you can work towards optimizing them.

How Important Are Good Rankings?

In “business speak”, there is nothing more valuable than a motivated buyer. Search engine users are some of the most qualified and motivated buyers you will ever have on your website. After all, they’ve taken the time to hunt for a certain topic – and have chosen your site to learn more.

Getting listed in a search engine isn’t the end of the game, though. If you’re number 415 of 1,259,000 search results, what are your chances of ever being seen? Perhaps more surprisingly, even being listed number 11 won’t help much. Most search engines display 10 results on the first page, and few searchers actually click through to look at the second page of results.

Your goal, then, is to achieve top 10 rankings for the keywords you decide to target (which we’ll look at here in a minute).

Ethical Search Engine Marketing

Some webmasters try to “cheat” search engines with unethical marketing methods including “cloaking” and “doorway” pages. Search engines don’t just hate these tactics, but they will ban or “blacklist” websites that use them.